


A Not So Happy Accident

by MsThunderFrost



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Accidents, Billy Hargrove Is Bad at Feelings, Billy Hargrove Tries to Be a Better Person, Brotherly Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Established Relationship, Hurt Billy Hargrove, Hurt Dustin Henderson, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Minor Injuries, Near Death Experiences, Protective Steve Harrington
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24229690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsThunderFrost/pseuds/MsThunderFrost
Summary: It was a normal Saturday at the Hawkins Public Pool. And then Dustin almost drowned.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 4
Kudos: 224





	A Not So Happy Accident

It’s a little after one o’clock in the morning when the first of several rocks bounces off of his bedroom window. 

He should’ve been asleep. He’d tried  _ so _ hard just to catch a few winks. But he’s still too keyed up from that afternoon, when Max’d called him at Scoops to let him know there’d been an  _ accident _ at the pool and tell him that he needed to haul ass to the hospital－

For one horrifying moment, he’d thought it’d been one of the kids. And it turned out that he was  _ half _ right. The kids’d been fucking around, taking turns pushing Billy’s buttons, and he’d been just about to order them out of the pool when Dustin’s foot had slipped on the diving board and he’d plunged into the deep-end with all the grace of a sack full of bricks. After a few seconds, he still hadn’t resurfaced, because, as they would later discover, his curls had gotten caught in the pool filter. Billy had managed to reach him in time, thank fuck, but not without hurting himself in the process. 

The kids had been in shock (though, as Mike would so eloquently state later on, this was less to do with their brush with death and more to do with the fact that Billy knew that being a lifeguard meant  _ guarding lives _ , and not just looking pretty as he sat in the lifeguard tower barking orders). Billy had had to administer CPR, but Dustin was conscious and semi-coherent by the time the paramedics arrived to whisk him off to the hospital. Max had been a bit skimpy on the details when it came to Billy’s injuries, but she’d mentioned something going the  _ wrong way _ and Steve’d fucking  _ lost it. _

He’d arrived at the hospital in time to catch a stony-faced Neil apologizing to the nurses for any trouble his son might’ve caused, and had had to restrain himself from ‘reminding’ Mr. Hargrove that, if it weren’t for his son, a fourteen-year-old kid would’ve died that afternoon.

Dustin had at least had the good grace to look sheepish when Steve’d finally located his room. “You’re fucking  _ lucky _ Billy’s got such a short fuse, kid. If he hadn’t already been ready to haul your ass out of the pool…” another sixty seconds and they wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation at all.

“I know.” Dustin looked  _ exhausted _ . There was a nasty bruise along his right shoulder, where he’d smacked his back on the diving board on the way down. It probably hurt like a bitch.

Tears prickled in the corners of Steve’s eyes－though whether they were from anger or fear, he couldn’t rightly say. “What the  _ hell _ were you thinking? Were you even thinking at all?”

“That I wasn’t gonna fall.” It was a sarcastic answer, but it sounded almost earnest. Steve pinched the bridge of his nose, counted backward from ten, and Dustin whispered, “Is… Billy okay? His wrist looked real bad. I think Max said he hit it on the side of the pool when he…”

“Billy’ll be fine.” He said. He  _ hoped _ . “And  _ you _ will apologize to him, after the doctor clears you to head home.”

“Yeah, I－I know.” His nose scrunched up a bit, “I really didn’t think anything bad was gonna happen. Billy’s kinda a douche, but I didn’t mean for him to get hurt. We－I－just wanted him to stop being such a hard-ass all the time.”

“Yeah, well, Billy being a hard-ass is what keeps you and all the other patrons safe.” Well,  _ that _ was a sentence which he’d never thought would leave his mouth. But it was also kinda true. Because, surprise surprise, when you  _ listened _ to the lifeguard, you also happened to not  _ almost drown _ . 

“...He’s never going to forget about this, is he?” Dustin asked, his bottom lip quirking nervously. 

Steve’d sighed, “If you’re somehow  _ not _ banned from the pool for the rest of your life, I’d be prepared for the rest of your summer to be a waking nightmare, kid.”

Another rock hits his window. He rolls his eyes, briefly contemplating how in the hell Billy thinks he’s going to scale the tree outside of his bedroom window to make it up there with a (possibly) broken wrist. Steve pops the locks on his window, sliding it open just far enough to poke his head outside into the pitch black of the night and－ _ oh _ .

Billy is an actual mess. Not that he isn’t, usually, but fucking hell－Neil had painted his son in reds and blues and greens, tainting his sun-kissed skin with a horrible, gut-wrenching mish-mash of color that made the discoloration on his wrist look  _ tame _ by comparison. Steve doesn’t wait at the window. He knows, even if Billy isn’t drunk or stoned (which he probably is), that he’ll try to scale the tree and with his fucking luck today, he’ll make it a whopping six feet off the ground before he tumbles out and breaks his neck. And that’s… just no. There’s been far too much excitement today, and there’s far too much bad mojo hanging in the air. Billy can use the front door.

So he ushers his boyfriend inside and sits him down on his bed, surprised that he cannot detect the lingering stench of weed on Billy’s ratty old wife-beater and that his breath isn’t sour from whiskey. The doctors must’ve given him the good drugs then, the kind that make you hot ‘n bothered in the middle of a grim and gray January afternoon. He sweeps at his red, bloodied lips with a cool washcloth and dabs disinfectant into the cut overtop of his eye and tells him how fucking  _ proud _ he is of what he’d done that afternoon. Because Billy had fucking  _ saved Dustin’s life _ and he deserved so much more than a new set of bruises to show for it.

“You look tired. You should be sleeping, pretty boy.” Billy reflects, slowly working at a piece of mint gum that Steve suspects tastes more like blood than mint. 

Steve doesn’t tell him that he couldn’t, not until he knew for sure that Billy was okay. Well… as okay as Billy could be, at any given time. But he suspects that Billy already knows, and that that is why Billy’s here with him, now. “Could say the same for you.”

Billy blinks, slow and lazy. Drags his tongue along the split in his bottom lip. “The Henderson kid. He okay?”

It occurs to him that Billy probably wouldn’t have had a chance to check, what with how Neil had all-but dragged him out of the ER. “He’s a little shaken up, but… He’ll be fine. I think he’s honestly more worried about getting banned from the pool for the rest of the summer.”

“Hmm.” Billy makes a sound that might’ve been a chuckle, but doesn’t otherwise respond. 

“He asked about you.” Steve says, after a beat.

The younger teen arches a perfectly manicured eyebrow, “Did he now?”

“Mhmm.” He places a bag of frozen peas on Billy’s wrist, apologizing softly when his boyfriend winces and hisses and tries to jerk away from the sudden cold. “I think it really shook him up, the fact that you got hurt saving him.”

“...’snothing. I was just doing my job.” Billy huffs. A soft, petal-pink blush dances across his cheeks as he averts his eyes and lets Steve tend to the rest of his bruises. “But, uh… you can tell him… ‘snot so bad. It’s not like… broken or anything. I can go back to work next week.” 

“Really?” He nods, dirty blond curls bouncing on his shoulders. “Good.” 

“It would be a travesty if my wrist were actually broken, y’know. This is my handjob－,”

Steve cuts him off with a kiss, gently guiding him down to lay flat on his back. Billy might be an idiot, at times, but he’s  _ Steve’s _ idiot, and right now he’s hurting, and while hearing that his wrist isn’t actually  _ broken _ made him feel about one-thousand times better… He really just wants to sleep, now, and forget that this entire clusterfuck of a day ever happened. And if he can’t sleep, then he can at least hold Billy in his arms whilst the other teen sleeps, and make sure that he doesn’t accidentally roll over onto his sprained wrist in the middle of the night. Billy nestles down beside him, burying his face in the crook of Steve’s neck and breathing, slow and deep－

“I ain’t gonna break, princess. I’m made of tougher stuff than this. A little love tap on the wrist and a couple of bruises won’t keep me down for long.” He says－he’ll tell him that as many times as the other needs to hear. 

The barest hint of a smile crosses Steve’s face, and as his eyes begin to grow heavy, he nestles just a little bit closer to Billy and thinks that he might just be able to catch a few winks after all. 


End file.
